Synopsis

Featuring the voice of Liev Schreiber

Isaac Babel's writings are subversive masterpieces, challenging the ideology of the early Soviet Union, and resulting in his arrest and execution in 1940. On the 75th anniversary of Isaac Babel's execution, Finding Babel follows Andrei Malaev-Babel, his grandson, on a journey to come closer to some sense of truth. Hoping to better understand Babel's powerful artistic method and elusive persona, Andrei journeys through Ukraine, France and Russia; locations deeply tied to the story of his grandfather. He confronts lingering traces of a turbulent history that echo in Babel’s writing and in the conflicts and climate of today’s Ukraine and Russia.

With each stop, Andrei gets closer to the complex stories that Babel wrote with depth and hidden meaning. Ultimately, through powerful interviews and a painful examination of Babel’s NKVD file, Andrei engages with his grandfather’s arrest, torture and execution. Babel’s life story and his fiction are woven into Andrei’s search with ethereal animation that puts viewers, like Babel’s readers, somewhere between reality and fantasy.

Director

David Novack is the director, and a writer/producer of Finding Babel. Prior to his work with Finding Babel, Mr. Novack wrote, produced and directed the film Burning the Future: Coal in America, which opened in theaters, aired on international television, and won awards at numerous festivals in the US and Europe including the prestigious IDA Pare Lorentz award for social documentary filmmaking. Mr. Novack toured with Burning the Future to China and Ukraine with the American Documentary Showcase, sponsored by the US Department of State. With the program, Mr. Novack lectured extensively at universities and film festivals and was profiled in magazines and television programs.

Mr. Novack produced Kimjongilia, a documentary about N. Korean refugees that premiered at the 2009 Sundance Film Festival. The film won the 2010 best human rights documentary award from the One World Brussels Film Fest of the Human Rights and Democracy Network. In additional to making films, Mr. Novack is a Professor of Film at the University of Pennsylvania’s School of Design where he enjoys mentoring a new generation of filmmakers.

Press

EDU

Satisfies on many levels...a sustained, soulful mediation on art, love, political commitment, and the tragedies of the twentieth century." - Boris Dralyuk, Executive Editor, Los Angeles Review of Books

David Novack's documentary Finding Babel provides an exemplary, moving, haunting introduction to Isaac Babel's writing and his world for viewers who have never read him before, and a stunningly effective reminder of his eloquence and vision to those of us who have. At a moment consumed with the rise of tyranny in Russia, the resurgence of right-wing extremism in Europe--and the US--and the crisis of refugees over the entire world, Babel's storytelling, his rhetorical restraint, and his moral fearlessness are more urgent than ever. Finding Babel reminds us all of who Babel was, and why he matters. -Marc Caplan, Judaic Studies and Comparative Literature, Yale University

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Seventh Art Releasing distributes unique independent and foreign films of the highest quality with a focus on documentaries. We are dedicated to releasing films that challenge and entertain to the largest possible audience. 7th Art has released award-winning films on , among many other things, music, social and political issues, Jewish history and culture, and human rights.